This Is a very tough one to moderate, my sympathies.
I think you guys are doing a good job, considering.
It’s absolutely true.
Ok, let us not go there. Look, these things are changing, pronouns are new, terminology is new, some of us are old. I am a old fart and some of this terminology stuff is confusing and annoying to me.
I am firmly on the side of "Pick whatever you think you are’ , but if you start calling everyone who uses what you think is the wrong terminology= "transphobic’ then we all are. Dont lose your allies over terminology.
Personally I think all 4 posters who have left are a significant loss to the board. I don’t envy the mods at all.
…but the poster in question who posted the OP isn’t everyone. They certainly couldn’t be characterized as an ally to transgender people. The poster in question has made their feelings crystal clear on this subject in that JK Rowling thread she started where she posted nearly every single day for over six months. We are tolerant of innocent mistakes. But this wasn’t an innocent mistake.
Eve, Jragon, Una Persson, Boudicca–who else am I forgetting? Are there any trans posters we have not lost over this subject?
(Edit: I think none of these folks are still regular posters, and I think all of them left in large part over the board’s transphobic culture and official tolerance for transphobia. My apologies if I am mistaken on any account here).
The 3 recent posters are Boudicca90, YWTF & monstro. Not sure if they’ll come back or not.
You’ll notice even their losses are polarizing.
We’ve lost posters on both sides. I am hopeful we can post some slightly more explicit guidelines to try to reduce the likelihood of the topic blowing up.
One side is the side that’s facing deadly oppression, and the other side is the side advocating oppression. I don’t think we should mourn the losses from both sides equally.
Exactly what I was going to say.
That’s not quite accurate. You have two sides who each are looking at what should be universally accepted biological facts differently. You can’t force perception to conform to what you believe. Biological differences in competitive sports is completely legitimate as subject to debate. By it’s very nature it’s going to be contentious. Yet participation in said debate is entirely voluntary.
Furthermore, the actual language used to debate the subject is under attack. That is another thing that you cannot force conformity. It’s a bit like this new-fangled Latinx word. I’m not going to use it. Other than to say I’m not going to use it. People should be free to express their ideas in a society that nominally values liberty and freedom of expression. The constraint of language and ad-hominem attacks are nothing more than an attempt to censor legitimate debate.
Oh, the person I mourn the most is Una Persson. She was SUCH an awesome poster. Careful, intelligent, generous, informative… And so kind to other posters. (Certainly kind to me.)
It’s not even close.
I used to go to this swimming pool, until this dude started pissing on my head every time he saw me.
I complained to the lifeguards, and they said, “It’s a swimming pool, you have to expect to get wet. What do you expect us to do, ban WATER from a SWIMMING POOL?”
I stopped going to that pool.
Well that’s different. Pissing on a head is nothing like presenting different opinions on subject of debate. Equating speech with assault is part of what I’m talking about when I mention how legitimate debate is attacked on the premise that some speech has been judged unacceptable.
Now if you really believe that certain lines of discussion or debate topics is equivalent to getting your head pissed on, well, that’s on you. Other people, who don’t feel like civil and open exercise of fundamental liberties, such as debate, should be artificially constrained by your sensitivities ought to be able to do so.
Thank you for the reminder: I forgot to mention something. The guy that kept pissing on my head? He told me it was raining.
and then what? you tattled to the life guards and they said so what, you’re in the pool it’s raining on your head and you got wet? so not following your logic here.
I think we lost @YWTF as a good poster well before all this. When she came to Discourse, this was basically the only topic she cared about. The way she acted was completely different than I’d ever seen her before. I think she had been firmly convinced that trans women were a threat to cis women like her, and nothing we could say was going to dissuade her from that.
She called the people who disagreed with her “misogynist,” she completely misunderstood many points, she accused people of helping Trump, and she didn’t even realize that her comment about suicide would be interpreted as saying people (and specifically the one trans poster in the thread) were faking it for attention.
She later repeated the same false studies and other TERF propaganda that had been shown to be wrong before. She was convinced that anyone arguing against her was against everything.
She fell completely down the TERF rabbit hole, and no amount of logic seemed to be budging her. And she was uninterested in anything else, which is why the smallest punishment you could give her, a topic ban, meant she left.
The only way I could see her not leaving would have been to either let her continue being hurtful, or not allow the discussion at all. And then we still wouldn’t have had @YWTF as we knew her before.
I genuinely do hope she comes back, but I don’t think that would happen until she reexamines those beliefs. It wasn’t anything we did as posters or you guys did as mods that caused the problem.
If you’d read any of the threads about this topic, you’d know this wasn’t true. The science is still out on whether trans women, after transitioning, still have an athletic advantage.
Plus you’re missing the whole “but cisgender men will pretend to be trans women to gain an edge” part of the argument.
Finally, you’re missing that the person in this thread tried to claim that anyone arguing a position other than hers just didn’t care about women, while slipping in little barbs.
In short, you missed basically everything that has been going on in this discussion, both here and in the thread in question.
Or straight-up wife-beaters…
Yeah, no judgment there…